Let’s start with the general list of departments you’ll see in a studio. Listing them in order of how things progress loosely through the pipeline.

Production
Editorial
Assets
Rigging
Animation
Lookdev/Layout/Tracking
DMP
Groom/CFX/FX
Lighting
Comp

Starting with you. Production. Production deals with the organization of the entire studio, and any production we work on. You make sure things stay organized, take notes, communicate with departments, keep artists on track, and document show issues. Without you, we can’t stay employed, complete tasks, or wrap up a show.

Depending on what your role is in production, you might also be asked to communicate with the client, talk to other vendors, and visit on-set productions. You are the first people our clients see and think about when they visit the studio or interact with it.

Depending on how big your studio is, and how busy it is, production artists might be assigned to certain shows. This means you only do tasks within that certain production.

There are a few different job titles in Production:

The Production Co-ordinator:


The official description of this job is a bit vague. You help move assets through the pipeline and keep all the tasks organized.

This sounds pretty easy, until you understand how many different pieces and people go into making one shot of a film. You are the first first most artists will talk to regarding shots, and it is your responsibility to make sure everyone knows what that artist is up to.

You will also take notes in daily's, communicate to the rest of production what the status of each task is, and make sure things are being completed on time.

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The Production Manager:


Production Managers help oversee departments, or entire shows. If they are overseeing a department, they will schedule weekly meetings to check in with the entire team, and alert them to new projects. As well as deal with pay, internal issues, and help renegotiate contracts. They also make sure that artists have tasks, are onboarded correctly, and stay busy. If they are assigned to a show, then they do some different things.

The PM keeps the production coordinators on the show organized, and checks in with them daily. They most likely have worked in production for several years prior, and know the pipeline pretty well.

They also work with the HODs(Heads of Departments) per artist role, and make sure each department is working smoothly.

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VFX Producer:


The producers of the studios deal with the studio-client relations. They oversee the final products being produced by the studio, make sure deliveries go through on time, check in on the final edits, and make sure the client is happy.

They rarely interact with artists unless the production is small, or something is needed quite urgently.

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The Executive Producer:

Eps help will projects for the studio. They do a lot of client and studio relations, and work closely with the VFX producer to get things done.

They can be involved in the marketing aspects of the company, be a co-owner, or have worked for the company for several years.

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The Assets Department


From a production perspective you might hear the assets department mentioned a lot. Assets is the department that created models that we use in production. For example, let’s say a shot needs a spaceship descending through the clouds. Assets will create that spaceship model.

They also are responsible for showcasing different designs on how something might look, matching models and assets to the concept art. As well as showing early renders or rotations of the model.

If something goes wrong here, most likely everything down the road will be a little bit hectic.

Assets need to publish everything in one location per shot, and make sure everyone is aware when they are updating a model. They also need to keep names of assets the same, and if those assets are referencing a certain directory, keep the paths the same. They also need to adapt to any quick fixes that will be needed to made down the road.

Editorial (The department that needs to be paid more)


Editorial is a special department. They would say: “Fire, fire, everything's on fire, and more fire.” As one of the many descriptions of their department. I’ve also heard one say: “We’re the resident therapists for the VFX supervisors.” I’d also argue they are the department that does the most overtime.

However, Editorial is the department that helps put together the final cut of the sequence of shots the VFX vendor is working on, or the final product. Generally, there are two main types of VFX editors. Client Side and In House.

The In House Editor will deliver the shots in sequence to the client side of the production, and make sure all the cuts are up to date. They will also omit shots on the vendor side if there is a change in the update cut. They will also make frame length updates to shots that the artists are working on.

They make sure the plates come into the studio, and lay down a rough template on how the shots should progress throughout the studio.

Client Side Editors are the editors who send things out to the many VFX vendors working on the production. They also receive the deliveries from the vendors. They keep track of the directors notes, sometimes visit the production on set, and flag anything that could be better.

They also bring all the shots together so the director can view it, and see what the final product might look like when the VFX is added.

Rigging


Rigging is a super technical department. They are responsible for making characters and other animated objects move.

They make the skeleton underneath the model that assets make. Animators use this skeleton to model the model over a period of time.

Creating this “skeleton” is a bit tricky. This skeleton is known as a rig. The rig when built needs to stay inside the model, work with any skin or muscle shapes on a character, and work with any asset updates. Sometimes the rig won’t work, and it is up to the rigging artists to fix it.

Animation


This is where the animators hang out. They place the movements on the characters, add emotion, and animate assets the FX/CFX department might need to make an effect work.

Animators in VFX complete different tasks than would regularly be seen if they were working in cartoons. They still take character models and animate them. However, part of their job in VFX is to work with motion capture data, fix any roto-animation, and match their character’s movements to the plates.

As a production person you might get a lot of requests from FX/Lighting/CFX for animation. This is because those departments can’t start on a shot unless they have animated models.


Lookdev/Layout/Tracking


Depending on how big your studio is, this department might be seen as one large one, or might be separated into three smaller departments. Lookdev is also sometimes done in assets. However, layout does a lot of it as well.

Without layout and tracking nothing in a studio would be completed. Layout is the core of almost every shot in VFX, and most of the time they don’t get a lot of praise for it. Their job is to recreate the scene as seen in the plate in 3D space. They also do their best to recreate the camera movements in the plate in 3D space.
They take any assets that the assets department makes and track them to the plate per shot. They also create ground planes for the shots, which is very important for effects work.

They also help create the roto-anim for characters based off the plate. This roto-animation can then be passed to animators, lighting, FX, and other departments.

Lookdev wise they do basic previs of how a shot might progress. They will take the 3D models they just tracked to the plate, and overlay different 2D elements over them. They can even add basic lighting, and effects to further sell the shot.

DMP


DMP stands for Digital Matte Painting. Matte Painting is one of the oldest professions in FX. Perhaps the oldest. If you have ever seen The Wizard of Oz, you know the iconic scene where Dorothy and her friends walk down the yellow brick road with the castle of Oz in front of them.

- That castle is a matte painting.

Most of the time in modern productions matte paintings are done digitally. This means an artist puts a bunch of images together in photoshop, and layers them to create a unique background. This image is then placed in the background of a shot, and the artist rotates, tracks, and tests to see how the image would fit in the sequence. They use a combination of Nuke with Photoshop to achieve this. Sometimes they also use 3D elements as well.

Groom/CFX/FX


Depending on the size of the studio, these two departments might be merged together, or are separate. In the studio I work at, these two things are separate, but we still share the same PM and HOD.

CFX and FX are not the same. CFX stands for character effects. This means anything to do with fur, clothes, animals, drool, bodily interactions, or muscles and skin is what they work with. They groom fur, and simulate fur. Sometimes there is a separate artist who just grooms the fur or hair on a character, and another artist simulates it. If you have ever seen The live action Lion King, the fur on the animals was done by CFX artists.

FX does all the other types of simulations. We create clouds, interaction effects between characters and their surroundings, magic effects, ocean simulations, mattes for comp, and much more.

As a production artist you might find that FX/CFX takes a long time for tasks to be completed. That's ok and normal. In order to start our jobs we rely on all the other departments to complete their work before we start on a shot. Often we start working with incomplete assets, and then update our simulations accordingly as the shots progress.

Lighting


Lighting is pretty straightforward. They take everything and light it. This involves matching their 3D lighting to the plates of the shot sequence. They make everything look like it belongs together.

A lead lighter will most likely create light rigs for a shot sequence, publish a series of frames for production to comment on, and when the lighting setup gets approved, pass that on to the other lighters.

Light rigs is a technical name for a group of lights bundled together. They are useful in the sense where lighters don’t have to create the same lights over and over again for every single shot.

After lighting the different elements, they will render everything out, and pass it to comp.

Comp (Another department that also should be paid more)

A compositor creates the final image.

They take everything from every department and make it look great. They add color corrections to renders, warp images, add lens flares, and much more. They are usually the last people to stop working on a show because they have to wait for everyone to produce their final results before they can finish.

They also do a lot of technical stuff as well. They create any 2D effects that might be needed in the shot, use effect libraries to layer over plates, prep the plates for other departments, the list goes on.